More money down the government black hole

IRS blew millions on lavish training conference.

Among the training sessions offered to IRS employees at a conference a few years ago in sunny California was one titled, "Political Savvy: How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot."

IRS management should have taken that course before planning that conference.

Instead, it's licking its wounds following revelations last week that the agency spent $4.1 million in taxpayer money on the conference. Employees stayed in $1,500-a-night-suites, sipped free drinks and took home $64,000 worth of specially printed notebooks, clocks, mugs and other goodies.

Employees heard a speaker who was paid $17,000 to talk for two hours while he painted portraits of famous Americans to reinforce his message of finding creative solutions to challenges. At least I presume they heard him — the IRS didn't bother to take attendance and has no clue how many of the 2,600 employees at the conference on your dime actually showed up at the keynote speeches.

But the most out-of-this-world example of flushing public money down a black hole was the $50,000 spent to produce videos for the conference, including a "Star Trek" parody shot on a custom-built set.

It's time for our leaders in Washington to, as the video says, "boldly go where no government employee has gone before." That means spending public money accountably.

"This is a case of people who lost sight of the fact they were spending taxpayer money and not their own," Gregory Kutz, assistant treasury inspector general for tax administration, said Thursday during a Congressional hearing.

The inspector general started investigating IRS conference spending last year after receiving an allegation of excessive spending at the conference held in Anaheim, Calif., in 2010. A review found nearly $49 million was spent on 225 conferences from fiscal year 2010 to 2012.

Government waste like that doesn't sit well with people like Robert Sanguinito of Easton, especially when they feel good government service is an alien concept.

While I was watching Thursday's Congressional hearing on the IRS spending, I opened a letter from Sanguinito. He wrote to complain that he can't get an answer from the IRS about why it's been holding up his tax refund since January.

"This morning on the news I heard the IRS spent 50 million dollars on jaunts," Sanguinito wrote. "Is this why they have to rob my $4,639, to help pay for it?"

Sanguinito told me Friday that he's a veteran, senior citizen and supervoter who wrote to me out of frustration.

"We just wanted people to know how difficult it could be when you're dealing with a group that's above the law," he said.

Sanguinito said one IRS representative told him his account was "frozen" but couldn't tell him why. Another told him there was no problem and he should get his refund in a few weeks. When he didn't get it, he called and spoke to yet another rep who told him his return was "frivolous."

He said he's been passed from office to office and recently was instructed to call an IRS office in Utah, where the voice mail says it isn't taking calls.

"You can spend $50 million on parties but you can't afford to have someone answer the phone to talk to me," Sanguinito lamented.

Most of the money spent on the Anaheim training conference initially had been budgeted to hire more workers.

The inspector general said in his report last week that the IRS and the federal government in general have tightened rules about conference spending and a lavish event like Anaheim wouldn't happen today. IRS conference spending has dropped considerably.

Faris Fink, commissioner of the IRS Small Business and Self-Employed Division, apologized for what happened in Anaheim during Thursday's hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

"In hindsight, many of the expenses that were incurred … should have been more closely scrutinized or not incurred at all and were not the best use of taxpayer dollars," he testified.

Fink played Spock in the five-minute "Star Trek" video. He said it was an attempt to use humor to open the training conference titled "Leading into the Future."

Committee member Matt Cartwright, a Democrat who represents Northampton, Monroe, Carbon and Schuylkill counties, did not attend Thursday's hearing. In a statement to the committee, he said he was "deeply troubled, like the rest of the nation, by the recent revelations that the IRS used funds inappropriately for its various conferences."

What's troubling isn't just the extravagance. It's that auditors caught the IRS doing stuff the tax agency would nail the average taxpayer for, like not documenting expenses or issuing W-2 forms to employees who should have claimed daily meal payments as income.

"The IRS effectively was guilty of tax evasion," Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California who chairs the committee, said during Thursday's hearing.

Rep. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, mocked the IRS for how it handled the conference designed to teach leadership at cleverly named sessions.

"It's unbelievably ironic, the workshops that were held at this event," he said, rattling off a few, including "Why Doesn't Somebody Do Something?"

That's a question Americans like Sanguinito are asking. It's the final frontier for our space cadets in Washington.

The Watchdog is published Thursdays and Sundays. Contact me by email at watchdog@mcall.com, by phone at 610-841-2364 (ADOG), by fax at 610-820-6693, or by mail at The Morning Call, 101 N. Sixth St., Allentown, PA, 18101. Follow me on Twitter at mcwatchdog and on Facebook at Morning Call Watchdog.